Normandy Format


The Normandy Format talks involve the representatives of
four countries, Germany, Russia, Ukraine and France, who met unformally during the D-Day celebration in Normandy, and who aim to resolve the war in Donbass. It has been also known as the Normandy contact group.

History

The group was created on June 6, 2014, when leaders from France, Germany, Russia, and Ukraine met on the margins of the 70th anniversary of the D-Day allied landings in Normandy. It operates mainly through telephone calls between the leaders and their respective ministers of foreign affairs. The Normandy Format has sometimes been expanded to include Belarus, Italy and the United Kingdom.
Negotiations and talks were stalled from 2016 until autumn 2019.
Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskiy, in his May 2019 inaugural address made peace talks with Russia his top priority. He reaffirmed that priority in July that year when he invited via YouTube his co-equal to a dialogue with the words
On 18 July, a "comprehensive" cease-fire was agreed with arbitration by the Trilateral Contact Group on Ukraine.
The revelation in late September 2019 of a phone call between US President Donald Trump and Zelenskiy in which the latter described the support of France and Germany as lukewarm damaged Zelenskiy's image in Europe. On 10 October, Zelenskiy repeated his statement in a public news conference. On 21 September, "continuing bickering" had been cited as causing "a political tug-of-war" over the preliminaries to negotiations, as they had been ever since the Normandy Format meeting in 2016 at Berlin, but the 9 September agreement between French President Emmanuel Macron and Russian President Vladimir Putin to reconvene quadripartite talks was duly remembered, and the decision to hold new talks was cemented at a joint Franco-German leaders meeting on 16 October.

Country leaders (as of 2020)

Meetings

There were six meetings.
  1. Château de Bénouville, Normandy, France — 6 June 2014 — the first meeting in celebration of the 70th anniversary of Operation Overlord
  2. Milan, Italy — 16–17 October 2014 — as part of Asia-Europe Meeting
  3. Minsk, Belarus — 11–12 February 2015 — Minsk II was signed
  4. Paris, France — 2 October 2015
  5. Berlin, Germany — 19 October 2016
  6. Paris, France — 9 December 2019
Due to the ongoing COVID-19 pandemic, the March 2020 summit in Berlin, Germany, has been indefinitely postponed, along with many other large, high-profile gatherings, like the G-20 summit and 2020 Summer Olympics.